Creating an Alexa Skill w/ the newest Alexa Skill Kit for Java :: Impl. an AWS Lambda function in Java, building and deploying w/ AWS CodeBuild

A short two years ago, I talked about "Bots, Amazon Echo, language user interfaces in general" the slides are still available and the code is of course still in GitHub. However, much has changed and fortunately for the better!

I still belief that Java is a very suitable language to build Alexa Skills and even if you are eventually going to host your skill in EC2 or as an AWS Lambda function, during development, Tomcat is your friend. Running and debugging your skill right on your laptop offers tremendous advantages during the development process. So lets talk about how to develop an Alexa Skill using Java and the latest Alexa Skill Kit for Java. We wil be using Java/Tomcat installed on a Laptop as our hosting platform, quickly put an SLL Cert in place, and develop an Alexa Skill.

... from WAR to Lambda ...

Java sometimes doesn't seem to be a 1st class citizen when it comes to AWS Lambda, but with just a few considerations, it's easy to implement an efficient AWS Lambda function in Java. To become useful, we'll also put the Lambda function behind the AWS API Gateway, so that it can be called from the web (i.e. with an HTTP GET or POST request).

Once we have done that we'll push the code into a Github Repository and move the build and deployment process into AWS CodeBuild. This (still new) AWS service for Continuous Integration and Deployment (aka CI/CD) will pull the code from the Git Repo and build the artifact, puts it into an S3 bucket, from which it is deployed into AWS Lambda ...

Come on .. that's cool stuff: Software Development meets Dev Ops.